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William Kent Krueger
Rave The Minneapolis Star-Tribune A literary mic drop ... Intimate and epic in equal measure ... This is a novel to cherish.
Nigar Alam
Rave The Star Tribune Absorbing ... The Partition is the historical landscape on which Alam\'s novel is drawn. It\'s a backdrop I found fascinating and one I didn\'t know much about ... Alam\'s novel explores the responsibilities of friendship, the weight of atonement when forgiveness is fleeting, and a theme that resonated most with me: that no matter the time, the place or the adversity of the circumstances, there are always women who cultivate meaningful lives for themselves and their children.
Emma Törzs
Rave The Star Tribune An enthralling fantasy debut ... Cleverly imagined ... It\'s magic.
Marlon James
Rave The Star Tribune ... a medieval feast of dazzling fantasy. It\'s vulgar and vivacious, big and brutal, full of rivaling monarchies, Machiavellian ministers, feuding families, revengeful prostitutes, evil priests and a century-old witch, all vying for power in James\' extraordinarily imagined African kingdoms ... Sogolon\'s voice is so engaging that it invites readers into this novel with more ease and generosity than Tracker in the first book ... I remain convinced that James is rebuilding the genre, but I\'m no longer sure he\'s demolishing the entire temple.
William Kent Krueger
Rave The Star Tribune The novel opens beautifully with Cork reminiscing on a bench beneath the courthouse clock that stopped when a bullet from gunfire that killed his father decades ago lodged in it. With the author\'s suspenseful measured pacing, his accomplished prose and his carefully crafted plot, Lightning Strike is Cork\'s creation story, his rite of passage to adulthood ... the wisdom Liam seeds to Cork is compelling and complicated, and I\'m so glad the author decided to share it with us.
William Kent Krueger
Positive The Star Tribune With the author\'s suspenseful measured pacing, his accomplished prose and his carefully crafted plot, Lightning Strike is Cork\'s creation story, his rite of passage to adulthood, unfolding during an investigation that \'threatened the peace in the Connor household.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Rave The Star Tribune ... a wonderfully entertaining, slyly feminist pulp novel ... Pulp fiction also has a characteristically unique attitude woven through its narrative, a wry and judgy sensibility. Moreno-Garcia\'s novel has all these pulp elements, especially the narrative swagger ... When...lives and their stories converge, the novel builds to an ending for Maite (and for readers) that\'s \'unusual and unforeseen.\'
S.A. Cosby
Rave The Star Tribune ... stunningly poignant and brutally profound ... Cosby gives readers a unique take on a revenge narrative, one propelled by furious action and two incredibly authentic and compelling main characters ... While almost every encounter Ike and Buddy have with others during their investigation erupts in violence (their \'muscle memory\' as cons takes over), Cosby has structured each of these confrontations to reveal Ike and Buddy\'s breathtaking sorrow and mind-numbing regrets. Throughout the novel, Cosby\'s cinematic prose brilliantly balances Ike and Buddy\'s brutality with their grief-filled moments and memories that are tender and heartbreaking.
Nadine Matheson
Rave The Star Tribune When I finished reading Matheson\'s The Jigsaw Man (in one sitting), I was gobsmacked to note that this nerve-racking, jaw-dropping, grisly, accomplished police procedural was Matheson\'s debut. Not only is the serial killer a fully fleshed out character (sorry, not sorry), but Detective Inspector Anjelica Henley is as worthy an opponent for a serial killer as Clarice or Tony Hill. Except Henley is a Black detective, complex, complicated, in charge, and fighting hard to stay a step ahead of the hacked-off body parts surfacing on the streets of London like puzzle pieces.
Thomas Maltman
Positive The Star Tribune \'Hear my tale,\' howls Mary Shelley’s monster across a frozen wasteland in Frankenstein ... Lucien’s story, Maltman’s novel (like Shelley’s), is a spiritual quest for meaning, a lamentation on loneliness, and a tense tale of the infectious nature of \'paranoia and fear.\' If you ask me, it’s a parable for our time ... The novel is rich with biblical and literary imagery. A few times there’s too much exposition, but Lucien’s search for meaning (and for Maura) quickly moved me beyond those moments ... when I finished reading I was reminded not of Shakespeare, or Shelley, or even the Bible, but of James Joyce. In Joyce’s novella, The Dead, Gabriel, the main character, watches the snow fall outside his window when \'his soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe … upon the living and the dead.\'
James Lee Burke
Positive The Star Tribune Humanity\'s \'predilection for inhumanity\' is a dominant strand in the DNA of all James Lee Burke\'s novels, particularly his exceptional series featuring Louisiana detective Dave Robicheaux, of which A Private Cathedral is the 24th ... Like all Burke\'s novels, this one is lush and lyrical and poignant and pretty damn brutal. It\'s a journey into Robicheaux\'s heart of darkness and America\'s.
Benjamin Percy
Rave The Star Tribune Each mesmerizing story in Benjamin Percy’s latest collection is rooted in the uncanny, where the familiar is freaky and the impossible \'a white smear rising out of the darkness.\' But even in Percy’s eeriest tales, compassion and wry humor infuse the narratives. Suicide Woods is more Stranger Things than Twilight Zone, closer to King than Kafka, and it’s as entertaining as whatever chilling show you’re bingeing on Netflix right now ... In each one of Percy’s stories, the settings are alive ... You’ve been warned.
Kalisha Buckhanon
Rave The Minneapolis Star Tribune In Autumn, Kalisha Buckhanon has created a narrative voice that’s authentic, emotionally charged and wise, but beneath the surface of the story lurks the unraveling of a life and how \'even the biological imperative to survive\' can sometimes lose against the \'power of past experiences.\' Buckhanon has crafted a deeply moving psychological mystery with twists that come in unhurried moments like the small notes the sisters buried in bottles in their garden shed. I’m going to be talking about Summer for a while.
Marlon James
Rave Minneapolis Star Tribune \"... [While reading, I became aware] that I was reading a complex surreal saga that demanded serious attention and that I was reading something new and remarkable ... The novel’s settings are stunning in their detail and expansive in their geography, but it’s James’ creative flexing of the oral tradition of storytelling as the novel’s backbone and his gender-fluid, omnisexual main character, Tracker, that may well make this novel a standard-bearer for future fantasies ... James skillfully and often humorously plays off of [classic] traditions in his allusions.\
Timothy Hallinan
Positive Milwaukee Journal Sentinel If you enjoy the ironic wit and criminal adventures of Lawrence Block’s Bernie Rhodenbarr, then you’ll want to read Timothy Hallinan’s Nighttown ... Junior Bender is one of my favorite fictional felons and Hallinan is a writer with the kind of heart and healthy cynicism that I admire ... Another of the pleasures of reading Hallinan is he’s a pretty literate dude too.
Mindy Mejia
Rave Minneapolis Star Tribune ...[an] evocative new thriller ... This psychological thriller is a triumph on two fronts: its evocative northern Minnesota setting, and the forthright voice of Maya Stark, its narrator ... Along with the breathtaking descriptions of the Boundary Waters...Mejia also evokes Duluth, its people and the \'absolute reign of Superior\' with humility and humor ... Maya is such a refreshing change from the trend of unreliable \'girls\' in current thrillers.
Mick Herron
Rave The Minneapolis Star Tribune In clipped, stylish prose, Mick Herron’s sly, twisty, bullet-paced narrative tracks Maggie’s journey from a skittish participant in her own life to a reluctant recruit in something diabolical. Suddenly, Maggie’s life becomes a Patricia Highsmith story.
Sujata Massey
Rave The Minneapolis Star With compassion and understanding, Sujata Massey’s narrative shifts between Perveen’s anguished past and the plight of the widows, unveiling fascinating details about the complicated, dutiful lives of women in Bombay. Massey draws an especially ­poignant and ironic analogy between Perveen’s struggle to succeed against her culture’s misogyny while India struggles against the vestiges of its colonial rulers.
Attica Locke
Rave The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Two bodies have been discovered near Geneva Sweet’s café in Lark, Texas: a black man and a white woman. You may think you know where Locke will take you given that premise, and you’d be a little right. Nobody’s ‘thinking about that black man … not when a white girl comes up dead.’ But you’d also be a lot wrong. Here’s why. This is a layered portrait of a black man confronting his own racial ambivalence and ambition told with a pointed and poignant bluesy lyricism … Locke’s novel is America ‘telling on itself.’ Listen up.
Justin Cronin
Mixed The Minneapolis Star Tribune If The Passage is the trilogy's Genesis, this second book, The Twelve, is its Exodus, a complex narrative of flight and forgiveness, of great suffering and staggering loss, of terrible betrayals and incredible hope. But whereas The Passage sets its philosophy, allegory and fictional artifice on the backbone of a terrific blood-curdling thriller, in The Twelve, the suspense is hobbled beneath a crushing burden of too many time jumps and too many characters … No doubt Cronin is a prophetic and passionate writer, capturing a world of ‘emotional incontinence’ where ‘the drive to kill’ has become our nature, where ‘humanity [is] dissolving and taking its stories with it,’ and where ‘the journey [has] acquired its own meaning, independent of any destination.’ And so if The Twelve is humanity's wandering in the proverbial wasteland, then the novel's ending suggests the final book in the trilogy will be a revelation.
Margaret Atwood
Pan The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel This is a convincingly rendered world — at times harrowing and hilarious (the Crakers have ‘built in insect-repellant’ when bugs are the least of their problems). With moments of psychological precision, Atwood explores the nature of evolution, the need for humans to lose their ‘grinning, elemental malice,’ and how a civilization must transcend its destructive past. But, unfortunately, the narrative is cumbersome, even silly at times (not in a good way). Characters become unintentional caricatures and eventually the story devolves into elusive fractured vignettes.
Benjamin Percy
Positive The Minneapolis Star Tribune Percy’s premise is disturbing enough, but add to it a masterful crafting of scary scenes strewn with gruesome details, a tough 12-year-old blind girl with a 'retinal prosthesis' able to manipulate the matrix, and a subtext exploring the effects of a world becoming enslaved to its technologies and you have a horror story for our times ... The narrative’s pace stalls at times from too much exposition about supernatural theories and occultists like Aleister Crowley, and about aspects of technology easily inferred from context. And Percy’s penchant for poetic prose — usually a strength of his style — was distracting here. But The Dark Net is still a frightening novel.
Stieg Larsson, Translated by Reg Keeland
Rave The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel The girl with the dragon tattoo is one of many intriguing characters you'll encounter in Stieg Larsson's mesmerizing not-to-be-missed Swedish mystery ... Her name is Lisbeth Salander and she has a gift. She can unearth a secret no matter how deeply buried. And there are a lot of them in this novel ... Another compelling character, Mikael Blomkvist, is the novel's protagonist and the story's amateur detective ... putting aside his work at the magazine he owns, Millenium, to explore Harriet's disappearance with fresh eyes. Eventually, Salander joins his investigation and the deepening relationship between Blomkvist and Salander is fascinating and a bit disturbing ... It's a smart financial thriller, a believable if unconventional love story, and a family saga laced with enough betrayals, treachery and just plain sibling nastiness that, as one character says, the Vangers 'make Shakespeare's tragedies' seem like 'light entertainment.'
Ernest Cline
Rave The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel The ‘earth is dying’ and most people either live in ‘stacks’ – Lego-like high-rises of trailers soldered together – or are ‘starving and homeless.’ To escape this dismal reality, everyone jacks into the virtual world of OASIS, a utopian universe ‘where anything was possible’ … He becomes the reader's avatar, navigating us through the novel's ‘multilevel labyrinth’ of settings, leading us across the virtual planets in his spaceship, Vonnegut, solving riddles and playing games on the quest for Halliday's egg … One of my favorite parts of this book is the astonishing amount of detail that Cline has constructed in the OASIS...I grinned at the sheer audacity of Cline's imagination when he'd weave a nerdy detail or clever geeky reference into this super-sized story.
Stephen King
Pan The Minneapolis Star Tribune It pains me (truly) to have to write this next sentence. King's 11/22/63 is a boring read … For five years, Jake tracks Oswald's movements, and it's this part that made me yawn. King has thoroughly researched this period of U.S. history, but it bogs down his story...the pages and pages of Oswald's domestic dramas and the chapters and chapters of the comings and goings of others involved in shaping his twisted psyche were just not that interesting.
Nicholas Petrie
Rave The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Nick Petrie’s thrilling Burning Bright transported me to the woods of northern California and the wilds of Washington state and I loved every page of this adrenaline-fueled journey. In fact, a beginning chase scene in the redwoods is not only breathtaking, it’s also one of the most original action scenes I’ve read ... It’s a formula Lee Child has driven into the ground. Thankfully, Petrie’s charging it with new life.
Elsa Hart
Rave The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ...an enlightening mystery that travels in a fascinating time and place. Hart imagines life in 18th century China with measured grace in her pacing and elegance in her prose.
Caleb Carr
Pan The Minneapolis Star Tribune I loved The Alienist, so it pains me to write that Carr’s Surrender, New York, despite tackling these same general themes in a contemporary setting, has little suspense and few thrills. I blame Carr’s narrator. Dr. Trajan Jones, a profiler walking in the alienist’s intellectual footsteps, is unlikable (not in any good way). His dialogue is pedantic and his point of view is thick with righteous indignation.
Flynn Berry
Positive The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Told in first person from Nora's perspective (and in present tense), this psychologically intense and darkly atmospheric mystery reminded me of Patricia Highsmith in its vivid style and toxic substance. I was completely drawn into Nora's grief as it propelled her on a hunt for the killer, so much so that even when I knew something was a bit off-kilter I was too committed to Nora to care.